Equal Ice

I’m a performer, but I don’t act on a regular stage.
I dress up in costumes, but I don’t play a character.
My stage isn’t one in a theater; it’s clean slick ice at a rink.
I don’t play a character, I’m just myself.
Sometimes on the ice though, I feel like I’m someone else. Someone who is graceful and beautiful, it’s still me though, just a different side of me. A side that I like much more than my everyday self.
Ice skating is much more work than people may think though, and some people don’t consider it a sport. It’s not as extreme as hockey for example.
I may not look very tough, but I can accelerate faster than the guys on the racetrack.
I take harder impacts than a rider being thrown from a bull.
And I handle more G-Force than a fighter pilot.
So why just be extreme, when you can be extremely graceful.

103. Chapter 103

Chapter 103

Gabrielle’s POV

After around five or ten minutes passed, I finally came out of the bathroom stall that I had secluded myself to. I had run in there to get away from Zack and Adam, and I was pretty positive that they had left already to meet with the rest of the team in the locker room. I was so sick of them bothering me and drowning me in all of this. They needed to just let it go and leave us alone since it is not their problem and none of their business.

All they do is make everything worse, but I knew that that was probably their goal anyway, and they were succeeding with it. I of course tried my best not to let it get to me, but every time that Zack and Adam, or anyone else said something to me, it just made it harder and harder to ignore what everyone was saying, and it was really starting to get to me.

I felt like I was constantly having this battle in my mind of telling myself not to let it everything affect me, while the other part of me wanted to just give up the fight and admit that I didn’t like what people thought about me and what people were saying about me. I bet that what people were saying about me was much worse than what they would say to my face, and I wasn’t sure if I would even want to know the half of what everyone said when Harry or I weren’t around.

Harry and I really hadn’t talked in depth too much about how we were going to handle all this. All we pretty much discussed was that we were just going to try and ignore it all until it hopefully went away and just see how that went. I felt like this was going to be endless though, I know it’s only been about three days and I guessed that I really couldn’t expect people to forget something that was as big of a deal as this was, but it felt like it had been so much longer.

Since we hadn’t talked much about this, I wondered how much this was bothering Harry. Was it all getting to him as much as it was me, or did he just act like he was oblivious to it all and it didn’t bother him too much? I made a note to myself that I needed to talk about this with Harry, I guess to just figure out what to do and how he felt about this and maybe if he could give me advice on how to deal with all of this. He is a lot more laid back than I am I’ve discovered.

On the outside he just seemed to let things happen as they happen and didn’t care what people thought about him, but on the inside though he could be completely different, maybe things do bother him more than he let on.

Then there was me, and I just worried about everything, and I was so worried about what people thought of me. I didn’t want to care about what people thought of me or how they saw me, but I couldn’t help it. It didn’t really matter now though because most of the people at the rink hated me and there wasn’t anything I could do about.

Well there was maybe one thing that I could do, and I hate myself for actually considering it, but I have.

I think another reason that this was easier for Harry than it was for me was because most of the people who he actually cared about what they thought, like his aunt and maybe Ben, didn’t care about him and I being together.

Sure he did have all the hockey guys on his case, but I really didn’t think that he was really that close with them, also not many people at the rink knew him.

My problem was that two people that I really cared about pretty much hated me and were really disappointed in me, three people if you counted Bella’s mom, but I still wasn’t positive on her thoughts about all of this, but considering that she told my dad, I didn’t think she approved.

Also, whereas Harry may not be very well known around here, I was, and my reputation here was pretty much ruined now. I was hoping though that maybe Harry could help me put a facade on the outside so people wouldn’t think what they said bothered me, because I knew it was obvious to people that I couldn’t stand a lot of what was going on, but to them Harry seemed unaffected.

At least to me he seemed like he was unaffected, but I didn’t know if everyone else saw the same thing. I mostly saw that it didn’t bother him since it bothered me so much, and he just had a different reaction to everything than I did.

I was thinking about all of this as I was walking across the lobby, and then thinking about it some more when I had sat back down on the couch that I was sitting on before I left do to the inevitably rude hockey players.

As I was sitting on the couch, I decided to occupy myself with some games on my phone while I tried to get my mind off of everything that I was thinking of, and I was also trying to get rid of the boredom I had just sitting there waiting for Harry to get done with practice, which was seeming to take a whole lot longer than I was thinking, but I knew it just felt so long because of how bored I was.

While I was in the process of a game where I had to move jewels into groups of three, my phone soon exited out of the game and my screen now had Bella’s name on the screen, showing that she was calling me. I was a bit surprised that she was actually calling me right now since as I far as I knew she was still angry with me.

“What is up with you today?” Bella asked me just seconds after I hit answer.

“What do you mean?” I asked her.

“You send me a text late a night telling me you don’t need my mom to pick you up, and you were not even at the rink, did you skip practice or something?”

I thought that she would be happy that she didn’t have to bother with seeing me today, but I shouldn’t known that she would want an explanation to why today has changed from the usual. I wasn’t sure whether to just continue on with her thoughts already that I skipped, because I didn’t want to tell her that Harry drove me here because that would just turn into her with a plethora of questions.

I also didn’t want to lie to her though since me lying to her was pretty much the reason why we were in a fight right now, well not so much a fight as her just being angry at me.

“Can we just talk about it later?” I asked her since it was the only thing that I could conjure up to say back since I wasn’t sure how I want to answer the question.

“Fine, whatever,” she said after a few moments.

I was a bit surprised to how easily she went along with that. Usually when she wanted to know something, she would never give in to the person telling her that they’d talk about it later, she would just demand to know. I guess in this case she really didn’t care that much or she just wasn’t up to talking to me that much right now.

After a few more moments passed, I assured with her that she would be picking me up tomorrow even though I wasn’t positive if that was the truth or not, but I still went with it just so I knew I had a ride tomorrow if I needed one.

After that she said she needed to go, and then we both hung up the phone. I put my phone in my lap and leaned my head back on the couch for a bit before sitting back up and going back to the game that I had been playing on my phone before Bella had called me.